Speech technologies exist for many high resource languages, and attempts are being made to reach the next billion users by building resources and systems for many more languages. In the past, the main focus of the speech community has been in building monolingual systems that are capable of processing speech in a single language. Multilingual communities pose special challenges for the design and development of speech processing systems. One of these challenges is code-switching, which is the switching of two or more languages at the conversation, utterance and sometimes even word level.

In addition to conversational speech, code-switching is now found in text in social media, instant messaging and blogs in multilingual communities. Monolingual natural language and speech systems fail when they encounter code-switched speech and text. There is also a lack of linguistic data and resources for code-switched speech and text, although one or more of the languages being mixed could be high-resource.

Code-switching provides various interesting challenges to the speech community, such as language modeling for mixed languages, acoustic modeling of mixed language speech, pronunciation modeling and language identification from speech. The special session will include oral presentations and a poster session. We expect participants from academic and industry spanning a wide variety of language pairs and data sets. We also expect discussions on how to create speech and language resources for code-switching and sharing of data.

Topics of interest for this special session will include but are not limited to:

Speech Recognition of code-switched speech

Language Modeling for code-switched speech

Speech Synthesis of code-switched text

Speech Translation of code-switched languages

Spoken Dialogue Systems that can handle code-switching

Speech data and resources for code-switching

Language Identification from speech

Papers should be submitted on the Interspeech 2017 paper submission site and the Special Session on Speech Technologies for Code-switching in Multilingual Communities should be selected as a topic. More details will be available shortly.